Long before scientists mapped the genome, writers and classical critics pondered the musicians in the Bach family, which spanned seven generations and upwards of twenty eminent musicians, notably including Johann Sebastian, Carl Philipp Emanuel and Johann Christian.

J. S. Bach biographer Johann Nikolaus Forkel wrote in 1802, “If there has ever been a family in which a distinguished predisposition for one and the same art was, so to speak, inheritable, it was most certainly the Bach family.”

In the late 1800s, Italian physician Cesare Lombroso used the Bach family as a case study to further his belief that intellectual qualities such as genius could be passed from parent to child. And before genetics became a mature field of study, Lombroso was far from alone in his assessment of the Bachs – the most famous of which was by Francis Galton in 1863 titled Hereditary Genius. How else would one explain such a concentration of musical talent and accomplishment in one family?

Modern thinking on the topic boils down to the age-old question of nature versus nurture. Certainly the Bach genes might help one of J. S. Bach’s children display the same interest in music as their father, but so might just growing up in a household where music was the family business. Music education opportunities were limited in the Baroque and Classical eras, and all four of J. S. Bach’s children who went onto to be musicians were trained by their father at the St. Thomas School of Leipzig.

C.P.E Bach was also greatly influenced by his godfather and close friend of J. S. Bach, composer Georg Phillipp Telemann. C. P. E. Bach’s access to Telemann is again a question of having the opportunity to be nurtured. Much in the same way the son of a banker might get an internship at a bank because of his father’s connections, bearing the Bach family name undoubtedly afforded a member more opportunity and guidance in their career than any other aspiring composer born in Germany in the 1700s.

It’s also worth pointing out that while the Bach family is held up as a case study where musical talent was passed down, there are any number of descendants of recognized musical geniuses that didn’t exactly carry on the family name. Historians agree that Mozart’s son Franz Xaver Wolfgang only achieved moderate success as a performer and composer. The prospect of being compared to his father plagued Franz much of his life, and the epitaph on his grave read, “May the name of his father be his epitaph, as his veneration for him was the essence of his life.”

A 1993 study by K. Anders Ericsson suggested that there was nothing special in the Bach family tree. Ericsson argued that experts were made rather than born, and his theory was popularized in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers as the ten-thousand-hour rule (referring to the number of hours of practice required to make anyone an expert.) This suggestion marked a stark departure from nineteenth-century scientists like Galton who thought the Bach’s family success was evidence of an inherited genius.

However, most studies now suggest that it is neither all nature nor all nurture, but some level of both that determines success. In 2009, geneticist Irma Jär­velä in Helsinki gave musical aptitude tests to subjects with no musical training who were related to musicians. The study found that about half of the variation in test results could be explained by heritability or genetics.

“Maybe it’s culturally based to some extent,” Macnamara said of why she thought the ten-thousand-hour rule became so popular. “I think it’s a very American kind of idea that, ‘just work hard enough and you can achieve anything.’ It’s very egalitarian, so people really like that idea.”

So was there some inherited “genius gene” passed through the Bach family? After a few centuries of back and forth, the modern consensus is that there probably were some helpful traits passed through seven Bach generations of musicians, but there were also more opportunities to be nurtured that came with bearing that family name.

On being subjected to long stretches of tuning at some early music concerts I’m reminded of the old joke about going to a fight and having a hockey game break out. Even if the tuning doesn’t actually take longer than the musical works on the program, its repeated eruption throws things badly out of balance: before the music has even begun, the listener’s excited anticipation deflates. Between the pieces the flow of the concert is continuously diverted because of all those finicky viols with their profusion of strings, and even worse the lute in the unwieldy state to which it had evolved by the eighteenth century. One contemporary wag quipped that having such an instrument was more expensive than keeping a horse, and that if a lutenist lived to sixty years of age, forty of those had been spent tuning the beast.

In a modern symphony concert the tuning proceeds quickly and has a strictly policed ritual form that hearkens back to the militaristic origins of the orchestra as an institution. The second-in-command – the concertmaster – orders an A from the oboe and then directs the various platoons to fall in line with the pitch. The present-day orchestra has modernized musical weaponry that can be quickly calibrated: the mustering of the troops takes about a minute. This demonstration of uniform sonic discipline then quickly recedes into respectful silence for the entry of the generalissimo – the conductor – who leads his army into battle against the massed armies of one great power or another – Brahms, Beethoven, or some new contender.

Such discipline is often absent among the disorganized irregulars of many an early music battalion. Their dutiful fussings are necessary perhaps, but often dispiriting.

In the eighteenth century tuning was typically done to a prelude improvised by the organist or harpsichordist. He was charged with slowly traversing harmonies that made for useful references for the adjustments of the stringed instruments. The American musical traveler and collector Lowell Mason heard precisely this approach in the nineteenth century in Bach’s old church of St. Thomas in Leipzig. Mason reported that the result was the most out-of-tune band he’d ever heard.

Nowadays there are apps for iPhones and kindred gizmos that make off-stage tuning possible for strings and winds. But some recalcitrants cleave to their twentieth-century ways rather than go back to the eighteenth or join the twenty-first.

Imagine never having to listen to protracted tuning at a concert – neither before nor during. Such a concert would have two robust halves of music separated by an intermission that felt like it had been earned rather than just being more dead time to added to that already killed by the tuning.

And while we’re bent on focusing our concert on content, uplift, and edification, let’s dispense with the clutter of applause and move things along directly between the pieces with an enlivening script presented by a fabulous speaker/actor who brings the story of the concert to life as no set of stuffy program notes could ever do. And since we’re cleansing the stage of distraction, let’s sweep aside the scores and the music stands. Disappear the conductor, too.

Impossible, you say, to ask every one of the dozens members of an ensemble to memorize their own parts in a program that approaches two hours in duration. And to expect all these disparate minds to remain on track without traffic-cop direction given by a conductor will lead to too many collisions to count. How can all these folks remain on the same page when there is no page in the first place?

But banish these objections for a moment further and picture these unencumbered players interacting with one another musically and physically, sometimes moving about the stage in a kind of dance and assuming visually striking formations. The seated soldiers of music rise up to become ever-changing tableaux vivants.

What this revolutionary approach opens up is the possibility of a concert as theatre in which the grace and vibrancy of bodies at music become integral to the performance.

Such a vision of performed music, be it is classed as early or modern, is no mere pipedream. One of the world’s great baroque orchestras, the Toronto-based Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra has brought this ideal to eloquent and unforgettable reality with its “Galileo Project” conceived for the International Year of Astronomy in 2009, marking four hundred years since Galileo Galilei made his first astronomical observations and Johannes Kepler published the Astronomia nova.

Developed by Tafelmusik during a residency at the Banff Centre, the Galileo Project was premiered there in January of 2009. Like a heavenly body migrating through the sky, the Galileo Project crossed Lake Ontario from Toronto to Ithaca, New York five years later to light up the Saturday night firmament in Cornell University’s Bailey Hall, a century-old neo-classical pile whose cavernous interior sometimes seems as if it could accommodate a couple of solar systems within its vaults. In spite of the far-from-ideal venue for the intimacies of early music, Tafelmusik filled the place up with the energy of its music and the appeal of the story it told with the aid of movement and image. The musicians traced their own orbits and cycles on stage beneath a large circular image projected behind them whose circumference was ornamented like Galileo’s telescope. It was as if we were looking through his lens at the extraordinary things from across the universe, from here on earth to the most distant stars; from Kepler’s printed words and music about the songs of the planets, to photographs of stunning terrestrial landscapes and fabulous nebulae and comets that we now can see at levels of resolution and magnification never dreamt of by Galileo himself. The well-researched and elegant script was written by the long-time Tafelmusik double bassist Allison MacKay, who has frequently collaborated on what she calls “cross-cultural and multi-disciplinary projects for the orchestra.”

Dressed all in black but with touches of color brightened by the colored hair of two of the female violinists, the players moved silently onto the stage to welcoming applause and started right in – no tuning! – with a Vivaldi concerto whose virtuosic allegro and seductive largo astonished and seduced, two things the night sky is also very good at doing. While this sensuous music of Venice introduced the Harmony of the Spheres in the context of the Galileo Project, it evokes for me the water and tenuous earth of its birthplace, Still, there is also something weightless and celestial in this eighteenth-century top-of the-charts stuff when done by Tafelmusik and its long-time director, Jeanne Lamon, recently retired but for the time-being still at her post.

From Vivaldi’s Venice we moved to France by way of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and comets and skyscapes seen through the Galilean lens to witness Phaeton’s disastrous crash of his father Apollo’s sun chariot. This suite of pieces came from Jean-Baptiste Lully’s 1683 Phaëton, the magnificent tragédie en musique about the ill-fated teenage joyrider. Tafelmusik literally moved from the overweening confidence of the pompous overture to the inexorably elegant and elegiac Chaconne in which twelve of the musicians themselves formed a circle and, like the signs of the zodiac, rotated through their choreographed yearly cycles. These motions allowed for the players to engage in seemingly spontaneous – but in fact carefully staged – dialogues of artistry and emotion in configurations at or near center stage that momentarily escaped the gravitational hold of the group.

From France we vaulted back a century to the musical world of Galileo, himself an amateur lutenist who came from a family of musicians. Galileo first demonstrated his telescope in 1609 in Venice, the same city that would later foster – and occasionally thwart – Vivaldi’s prolific genius. The transition was achieved effortlessly through the recitation of Galileo’s own writings by the narrator, actor Shaun Smyth. An Albertan born in Scotland, Smyth brought with him from the old country a mastery of dialects of the British Islands that he deployed occasionally – and only when called for – with humor, flare, and taste.

Smyth and the musicians traced the chronologically retrograde path from Vivaldi to Lully to Monteverdi Smyth by way of McKay’s insightful and well-researched script. Now with Galileo we heard the streaking comet of Monteverdi’s concerted madrigal Zefiro torna set by Tafelmusik for its two cellists, Christian Mahler and Allen Wheat, singing through their instruments like cosmic angels. Unleashed from the planets Plato imagined them sitting, they ran wild through earthly meadows and woodlands. A deft modulation lead to another treatment of same bassline by a fellow composer of Venetian stamp, Tarquinio Merula. We then retreated the shadows of a solo lute Toccata by Galileo’s younger brother, Michelangelo, the piece played with captivating melancholy and finesse by one of the orchestra’s most potent forces, lutenist/guitarist Lucas Harris. The plaintive voice of his instrument, designed to be heard in renaissance chambers, drew the hundreds-strong Bailey Hall audience into its inner feelings with a pull as strong and ineffable as gravity. It was a piece Galileo would have heard and indeed likely played himself, especially during the years of his long house arrest. These offerings were framed by pieces from the most famous work of Galileo’s time and place, Monteverdi’s Orfeo, which premiered two years before the astronomer first pointed his telescope at the sky.

After a fact-checking peek at the night sky from the plaza in front of the concert hall, I returned from intermission to my seat just as the orchestra marched back on stage for a Purcellian prelude to a re-imagining of the festival of planets organized in Dresden for the Saxon-French royal wedding of 1719: with Rameau, Handel, Telemann and Zelenka we toured Jupiter, Venus, and Mercury.

After Smyth’s hilarious rendition of an eighteenth-century English drinking song that lauds and ridicules the paradigm-shifting discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton, we heard J. S. Bach’s flights of fancy around Venus in the sinfonia to his cantata, How Brightly Shines the Morning Star (BWV 1). The chorale melody around which the other contrapuntal parts orbit resounded from one of the orchestra’s wonderful oboists placed in the hall’s distant balcony – yet another instance of the group’s creative use of the venue as a tool for mapping sound and space.

The evening closed with a rocketing rendition of another of Bach’s beloved cantata sinfonias, the opener to BWV 29. This piece had once been repurposed by Bach from a solo violin work to an organ concerto. It was again transformed by Tafelmusik into a violin concerto during which yet another of the group’s many star fiddle-players had a chance to shine, concluding a concert/performance that among its many marvels was an astounding feat of group memorization demonstrating the limitless reach of music in and as motion that, like the Keplerian cosmos, was never out of tune.

There is an unofficial marker in the timeline of canonical classical music. It falls around 1800, during Beethoven’s lifetime, separating composers for whom biography matters to non-academic listeners from those for whom it doesn’t. It is assumed the listener needs to know about the lives of post-1800 composers: about the onset of Beethoven’s deafness and resulting feelings of alienation in order to understand the storming anger in his music, about Chopin’s sense of exile in order to properly feel the longing expressed in his, about Schumann’s struggles with mental illness in order to properly feel the spasms between passion and introversion in his, about Mahler’s faith and disillusionment in order to feel the weight of existential crisis in his. It grows out of our desire to find personal meaning in art, to find some message encoded in all those notes. We need to believe we know what our composers were about before we can trust that we’re receiving their ideas properly. To get it wrong is somehow to do them an injustice. It certainly simplifies the process of listening. We know, with Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, and Mahler, what sort of mood we are supposed to be in even before the music begins to play. But it also simplifies and often distorts the historical record, reducing the complicated lives of our heroes to a series of mythological icons. Elsewhere in this publication [Los Angeles Review of Books], I’ve wondered if this is a problem worth worrying over: “A thousand battalions of Mozart scholars cannot erase the image of Miloš Forman’s Amadeus. But should they try?” With the publication of John Eliot Gardiner’s Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven, anew quasi-biography of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), we’re situated comfortably on the other side of the 1800 line, back during the musical “Baroque” where we have a chance to see the problem at its thorniest, focusing on the composer who proves its most difficult test case.

For today’s classical music audiences one of the most problematic aspects of music before circa 1800 is answering the simple question “why did they make this piece of music I’m about to listen to?” The answers, for Beethoven and all composers succeeding him are comfortably familiar: Music is testimony of the self or the world of the self. It is done for Art (capital A), for the Inner Spirit, for the memory of the persecuted, to expose the existential anxiety of it all, etc. The early Romantics reached back a little bit and quickly salvaged Mozart (who, after all, should have lived to see 1800) by projecting testimony back onto him – of Oedipal strife and a difficult personality – fairy tales that still make up his mythic badge (“drunken child savant”), providing a framework for listeners to have satisfying emotional experiences when listening to him. But further beyond the wall mythology gets more difficult. As entertaining as Vivaldi’s music is, and as intense as his life may have been, who seeks out his music to experience the artistic integrity of his personal testimony? No one cares what Palestrina’s relationship with his father was like, or whether or not Handel believed in authoritarian order when he wrote Giulio Cesare. So much of the daily reality surrounding the music of the more distant past gives us less heartfelt, less Romantic, less personally-resonant answers to the question “why do it?” (for the King, for the paycheck, for the Pope’s pleasure cruise) that the profundity of the music can seem to suffer for its lack of subjective, creative angst that we seem to crave and they perhaps did not.

Thus much pre-1800 music is today relieved of being much more than “mood” music. Our approach to the music of the Renaissance, for instance, often becomes caught in a circular logic that keeps us at a distance. It is beautiful, yes? It is expressive, yes? And so what does it express? Beauty. And why is it beautiful? Because it is so expressive. But what does it express? . . . and on and on. The music of the Baroque, on the other hand, often represents extreme emotional states. It is not, however, the conduit of the composer’s own feelings, but of the “official” emotional posture required for whatever event, patron, institution or (for the opera) story they were writing. Emotional states, during the enlightenment, were just another natural phenomenon to be illustrated and represented, like winds or water or birdsong. As Joseph Kerman put it “Baroque composers depict the passions. Romantic composers express them.” The idea of personal expression had to wait for a few big cultural rifts. First, the freeing of composers from the Ancien Régime system of patrons and institutions, making them independent artists following no one’s taste but their own or their public’s. Second, the Napoleonic cult of the individual commanding that the artist, no less than the philosopher, look inward. As Johann Gottlieb Fichte pitched the new Romantic creed in 1792: “Turn your gaze away from all around you, and inwards on to yourself.” Once again, Mozart and Beethoven were the earliest prototypes of the new musical artist who would not or could not submit to the whims of church or aristocratic patronage and who instead struck out on their own, misfits, outlaws, non-conformists misunderstood by their era. This is all as much mythology as history, a plotline we internalized so long ago it will likely never be shaken.

And so biography for Pre-Romantic composers has often seemed superfluous to the experience of listening – merely academic, and usually pretty hopeless. Among the pre-1800 masters, Bach biography in particular is a prickly and thankless calling. It requires one to fuss endlessly over minor details, or at least to pretend to. It entails teasing phantom details from in-between precious few lines of actual primary sources, most of which are notoriously dull and legalistic. It requires you to do this while knowing that these same precious few, dull, legalistic sources have already been pored over by dozens of prior adherents to produce dozens of contradictory hagiographies and incompatible mythologies leaving us little more than a name-symbol accompanied by a jumble of tepid modifiers. To Christoph Wolff‘s recent Bach: The Learned Musician, we can add a few more alternately dismissed or embraced by Gardiner: the “exemplary Teuton,” the “working-class hero-craftsman,” the “bewigged, jowly old German Capellmeister,” the “incorrigible cantor.” If none of these monikers sounds terribly appealing or particularly dramatic to you, as opposed to say, Beethoven: The Stormy Napoleonic Revolutionary, or Mahler: The Disillusioned Neurotic Spiritualist, then you are starting already to see another problem with Bach biography. When you combine the stubborn refusal of the historical record to yield much of anything tantalizing, the expectation that none of it makes it into his music anyway, and the cowing complexity of that music, the end result is not a familiar emotional character-type but a cold distance, a sense that he and his world are unreachable and irrelevant to the listening experience. Yet Bach receives more biographical attention than any composer before Mozart and remains his chief rival for sheer quantity. Unlike the other canonic masters, the popularity of Bach studies shows no sign of letting up. The early twenty-first century has already seen more attempts to figure him out, of both the strict academic variety (along with Christoph Wolf’s biography, there are substantial essays and monograms by Robert L. Marshall, Peter Williams, and John Butt) and user-friendly “crossover” variety (Davitt Moroney, Martin Geck, Paul Elie, Eric Siblin) than any of the other candidates, including those like Mozart and Beethoven whose source material is richer in detail and drama. This mania for redundant parsing of the same scant material remains an unusual situation. Understanding it is key to figuring out what, if anything, Gardiner’s attempt has to offer.

His goal, on one hand, is humanization, to bring Bach closer to us. And, having throughout his life as a conductor absorbed any and all research on his favorite composer, he acknowledges many of the problems:

Even to his most ardent admirers Bach can seem a little remote at times: his genius as a musician – widely acknowledged – is just too far out of reach for most of us to comprehend. But that he was a very human human being comes across in all sorts of ways: not so much from the bric-à-brac of personal evidence such as family letters and first-hand descriptions, which are few and far between, but from chinks in his musical armour-plating, moments when we glimpse the vulnerability of an ordinary person struggling with an ordinary person’s doubts, worries and perplexities.

The anxiously modified tautology “he was a very human human being . . . ” gives you some sense of what Gardiner fears he is up against. More than any other composer, Bach illustrates the problem of articulating the emotional mechanisms of music. There is a long tradition of disappointing hermeneutics lurking there. The mainstream of Bach reception has been characterized by a frustrating poetic reticence, a dissonance between strong claims that his music is emotive and deeply moving coupled with a refusal or inability to identify the source of that emotion in terms other than its exhaustiveness or its impressive contrapuntal achievement. The poetic potential of his music is usually tied to its stylistic breadth and technical complexity, an exercise in the monumental and the logical, which impresses only insofar as it remains aloof from emotional particularity. That distance has proven useful. The vagueness of those powerful emotions everyone claims to feel, their being tied to something so seemingly unnameable, has allowed each generation to remake Bach in whatever image suits them. It is, in other words, what makes possible that most ubiquitous and banal claim about Bach’s music: that it is “Universal.” That cardinal cliché is difficult for any biographer of a “great” to avoid, and Gardiner is no exception, finding in Bach’s sacred music, “a universal message of hope that can touch anybody regardless of culture, religious denomination or musical knowledge.”

Such platitudes, of course, tell us nothing except how easy it has been to renew Bach’s music decade by decade. As anyone surveying the last hundred years will realize, and as Paul Elie pointed out last year in his Reinventing Bach, the twentieth century belonged to the miraculous Leipzig cantor. While other composers had their moments, and the center of the concert hall canon might seem to tilt every so often between earlier and later Romantics, by the beginning of the twentieth century it had been decided that Bach would always stand as the monad, the font, the Grossvater of us all. The image of Bach as prototype has been a cultural obsession since the 1830s when the Romantics first rediscovered his great settings of The Passion of Christ. That revival, beginning with Felix Mendelssohn’s historic performance of the St. Matthew Passion (BWV 244b) in 1829, the first time it had been heard since Bach’s own lifetime, succeeded in doing two things for Mendelssohn’s generation: it extended the German canon back a century, proving that “deep” music had always been a Teutonic thing, and it made a literal merger between Art and Religion for a generation that increasingly saw the concert hall as a site for their most spiritual and philosophical experiences.

Since that moment, Bach has been the official center of gravity that binds together the musical universe. It’s not an empty honorific. “In Bach,” according to Mahler, “the vital cells of music are united as the world is in God.” For Brahms his music represented “a whole world of the deepest thought and most powerful feeling.” The nineteenth century turned his off-putting complexity and biographical distance into a mechanism for confronting the sublime, that ultimate proof of Romantic ideals. Whether it was the tangle of a solo keyboard fugue, or the glacial face of the opening chorus in the St. John Passion (BWV 245), his music was a test, a mountain to be climbed so that one might, with pain and awe, glimpse and reach out to touch the highest possible points mortally attainable.

By the third decade of the twentieth century, the sublime had met up with the mass market mechanisms of radio and recording. His most famous works were packaged for maximum virtual mountaineering, the keyboard works played in lush, gargantuan transcriptions by the likes of Rachmaninoff and Busoni or clothed in the grandest garb of all, the oversized Wagnerian symphony orchestra. If the mountaintop is too far away, and too steep a climb, then the NBC Radio Orchestra would snip off the peak and send it to your living room where it would still seem plenty big. The transcriptions by Leopold Stokowski of works like the Chaconne (BWV 1004) for solo violin or the Passacaglia and Fugue (BWV 582) for organ were gorgeous, plodding wooly-mammoths that marked a moment of maximal popularization for Bach: Gothic Bach, Unfathomable Bach. This was the Bach world that John Eliot Gardiner was born into and would eventually help to replace.

His career as a conductor of the Monteverdi Choir, The English Baroque Soloists and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique falls squarely into a newer phase of Bach reception, an epochal shift in what Bach symbolized and eventually what he sounded like. This new Bach, the Bach that has reigned in the cultural imagination for the last seventy-five years, which musicologist Susan McClary has dubbed “Pythagorean” Bach, emerged as part of the stark turn away from Romanticism following World War I. The modernist rejection of “subjectivity” and personal psychological confessionals in art led to something of a downfall for Wagner, Mahler, and most of the great nineteenth-century Romantics. But the disillusioned post-war avant-garde found intellectual solace in the alienating distance between Bach and the human. Unlike Wagner, and Beethoven, and Schumann, Bach was untainted by personal psychology and corruptible human desire. He again benefited from having no historical personality, seeming to float above it all in a positivistic paradise where music and number intersected free of the original sin of emotion. His difficult and seemingly flawless counterpoint could serve as a crucible for what mattered in the years of Modernist formalism: Truth, objectivity, incorruptible processual integrity. The chores of complicated composing rules seemed to the modernists the best protection from backsliding into old bad (read: Romantic) habits. For Stravinsky, Bach’s fugues were “a pure form in which the music means nothing outside of itself.” Even as multiple generations or artists turned for comfort to the play of abstract forms, Bach managed to remain the center of the musical universe.

Even the radical post-World War II composers of total serialism, chance music, and computer music could not fault the pristine precision of his counterpoint. Gothic Bach had given way to Harmony-of-the-Spheres Bach, a different kind of metaphysics, but one no less rooted in the sublime – The Mathematical Sublime. Think no further than the close bond between Bach and Glenn Gould, that next great mythic icon of modernist detachment. To twist Gardiner’s tautology, Gould was one of the least human human beings to have ever been. Like everyone else, he found himself in Bach, imagining him as an artist “withdrawing from the pragmatic concerns of music-making into an idealized world of uncompromised invention.” This, of course, is precisely what Gould did in 1964 when he retired from live performance to concentrate his efforts exclusively within the precision-bubble of the recording studio, freed from the concert hall and its stink of the human and the social. Gould, too, is now central to our mythology of artist types and, in the popular imagination, Bach has remained the music for that type: esoterics and ascetics and Beautiful Minds. It is the music to which Hannibal Lecter plans his meticulous escape in The Silence of the Lambs. It is the music obsessively plinked out by the father of Allison Janney’s character on The West Wing, of course a mathematician, of course seeking structure through the spreading disorder and isolation of Alzheimer’s Disease. Music, Math, and Discipline. Clarity, Structure, and Complexity.

It is necessary to revisit Bach’s complicated reception history because it is out of all of this that Gardiner hopes to bring back to human form his “very human human being.” It is a tall order, and a motivation one may not immediately trust considering how much Gardiner’s own recordings have helped to solidify the modernist view. As he relates it in Music in the Castle of Heaven, he experienced that version of Bach early on in his studies with Nadia Boulanger who preached the Stravinskyan catechism of discipline and order: “She insisted that the freedom to express yourself in music, whether as a composer, conductor or performer, demanded obedience to certain laws.” His own recordings, part of the wave of “historically informed” interpretations using original instruments and claiming to resurrect the performing styles of Bach’s own era, have come to define the sound of Bach for the current generation of listeners. Those initial claims to “authentic reconstruction” have long been put aside, and we have (most of us) come to admit that we like this sound not for its historical authenticity but for how well it matches up with our own Mondrian-esque view of Bach: sleekness, clarity, momentum, almost superhuman precision (with Gardiner’s Monteverdi Choir often at tempos that take the breath right out any mere humans foolish enough to try and sing along). Gardiner’s interpretations are only the most successful of an entire generation of conductors (along with those of Sigiswald Kuijken, Phillipe Herreweghe, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, and Masaaki Suzuki among others) whose sound lays bare the abstract lines in Bach’s counterpoint by eliminating all of the distractions of older, Romantic performing styles: too much vibrato, too much rubato, too much dynamic swelling, not to mention too many performers. It would be impossible to overestimate how important Gardiner’s recorded legacy is to contemporary Bach reception. As novel and shocking as his recordings may have seemed to my own teachers who grew up on Otto Klemperer and Wilhelm Furtwängler, I am just young enough that his 1990 Mass in B minor (BWV 232) recording on Archiv was the first I heard, as was his St. Matthew Passion, and most revelatory to me, his recording of Bach’s Magnificat (BWV 243a). Today, for my students, Gardiner’s Bach is “normal” Bach, and those earlier conductors seem shocking, impossibly foreign, as from a lost and bizarre era.

The book, then, surprises. Given this reputation for clarity and precision, it is surprising that Gardiner’s inner dialog with the composer is such a humanely messy concoction of the spiritual and the psychological. One wonders if the motivation for the book is not to provide something of a correction to his own public reception. That a great performer may look back on his career and fear that everyone has missed his point all along must be daunting. Though one suspects that the thirty-year-old Gardiner, caught up in the heady days when the “authentic performance movement” was laying siege to record labels, might have written a different book. Much of Gardiner’s current view seems to have been born of the extraordinary project he undertook in 2000, dubbed the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage. While hardly as austere an experience as the name implies (it was backed by a major record label and documented by a BBC camera crew), it was still a powerful testament to our continuing Bach obsession – a full year spent living life as an itinerant cantor, moving from one church to another throughout Europe, preparing and rehearsing two complete, often unfamiliar, Bach cantatas each week along with a number of other Bach monuments, some two hundred total pieces of difficult music all conforming to the liturgical calendar that was the composer’s own constantly ticking task master. That intensity of focus, of having one’s international conducting career turned for a year into the comparably claustrophobic vocation of Lutheran cantor, in short the pretense of “walking in the composer’s shoes,” seems to have shaken loose a lot in Gardiner. He speaks of it like an evangelist bringing back answers from the desert:

Following Bach’s seasonal and cyclical arrangement of cantatas for an entire year provided us with a graphic musical image of the revolving wheel of time to which we are all bound . . . solving the enigma of how this music brimming over with vigour and fantasy could have emerged from beneath the wig of that impassive-looking cantor . . .

The punishing pace of creativity and the picturesque settings seem to have provoked a sort of vision quest, part time-travel fantasy and part genuine insight into how distant a figure as Bach might actually be. It is no surprise, then, that the most satisfying sections of the book are those where Gardiner lets us into that inner dialog by reconstructing his thoughts during moments when he is swimming in the music during rehearsal or performance. Some of this talk is very much in line with the Pythagorean orthodoxy:

to convey what it feels like to be in the middle of it – connected to the motor and dance rhythms of the music, caught up in the sequential harmony and the intricate contrapuntal web of sounds, their spatial relations, the kaleidoscopic colour-changes of voices and instruments . . . the way it exposes to you its brilliant colour spectrum, its sharpness of contour, its harmonic depth, and the essential fluidity of its movement and underlying rhythm.

So far so Gould: sequences, spatial relations, colors, contours, lines. But as the book progresses, Gardiner reveals another layer of his current thinking about the composer, through both his perspectives on those same dull primary sources, which unfortunately he chooses to revisit in great detail, and through his favorite individual passages of the cantatas and Passions, which happily he does in just as much detail. The biographical half of the book shines in those sections when he imaginatively recreates the feel of the places Bach lived, penning him in a much smaller and uglier world than one might wish to imagine. Gardiner’s biographical Bach is impressively small: not a German but a Thuringian, not part of a Lutheran community but part of a family-clan, not a citizen of the Enlightenment but an overworked and alternately obsequious and litigious crank mired in the petty squabbles of provincial town life. Remote from the big thinking that usually makes up the intellectual context of Baroque studies, Bach’s world as presented by Gardiner is decidedly un-sublime. While far too conjectural in its details to be taken as an authoritative biography, it is a welcome antidote to the sweeping historical movements which usually serve as the “context” of important artist’s lives: The Enlightenment, The Baroque, The Holy Roman Empire. Bach’s world is too small for such big frames. Gardiner usefully reminds us that it is entirely possible to live “in the Enlightenment” without knowing it or showing many signs of it. It is a common sense point that some academic writers of epistemological “top-down” history might heed more often.

With a Huizinga-esque flair, Gardiner depicts Bach’s milieu in terms calculated to pull him off the mountaintop of “pure music.” From the rough and tactless scrounging required of preceding generations of the great “Bach Clan” to survive the gray landscape of the Thirty Years War (“the malaise which through most of the previous century had blighted the struggles of their parents’ and grandparents”), to Bach’s own dingy coming of age in the brutish boy’s schools of Eisenach and Ohrdruf with their Caravaggiesque gangs of knife-wielding ruffians (“brawls . . . [that] . . . developed unchecked while the burghers stood by, impotently wringing their hands . . . [over the] territorial division of the town between these embryonic Jets and Sharks or Mods and Rockers”), all the way to the petty arguments that made up much of his life in a Leipzig run by “a formidable alliance of secular and religious powers whose methods of subjugating employees had been honed over time and who were expert at making life difficult . . .,” Gardiner shows a consistent flair for the drab and depressing.

As in Huizinga’s history writing, the rough detail in this portrait of a querulous, often petty cantor and his dour world is meant to shock and alienate the reader. In breaking the composer out of his abstract cocoon, Gardiner also manages to break down the stereotype of the detached ascetic inhabiting a world of pure intellect. But that distance, once achieved, and the reader’s predictable recoil from the grubby reality offered up, is actually just a step toward Gardiner’s next goal, to locate in Bach some basis for a tragic persona that can serve as a framework for reading his works psychologically and autobiographically. The goal is not without merit. For listeners, it promises a renewed emotional resonance between we moderns and Bach’s sacred music that goes beyond the old saws of purity or complexity. The tactics, however, are predictable and problematic. To pull Bach, and only Bach, across the 1800 wall and into the world of authentic testimony, Gardiner needs to pick and choose when to allow him to be a very human human being living in his very small human world, and when to allow him the luxury of transcending that world in order to communicate his “universal” message. It is a difficult needle to thread.

The Bach that emerges is heavily marked by that rougher, darker setting. But the resulting scars are arranged into a familiar pattern, that of the romantic outsider. He is orphaned, death-obsessed, outlaw, non-conformist, a sullen misfit. He is “battle scarred” from disputes with both civic and court authorities, scars that include the memory of imprisonment and the threat of destitution. He rejected the career path of his more successful contemporaries toward the soulless but profitable theater music of larger urban centers out of pure artistic integrity (“not from any Lutheran prudery but simply because the music he heard there left him cold”). Instead he propagated “mutant” musical forms that were largely misunderstood by his own audiences and bosses. He is set upon by smaller musical minds who question his lack of a university education. Thus even Bach, the supreme technician (and posthumous terrorizer of conservatory students the world over), is able to fill the Romantic role of the unschooled, or at least un-institutionalized, outsider. He stands alone as a complex psychological figure among a collection of shallow and imperious straw men: despots, bureaucrats, venal patrons, abusive pedagogues, jealous academics, frivolous popular composers (Telemann serves as the main foil here), and audiences craving easy delights. Bach alone is allowed the luxury of introspection and depth because Bach alone is tasked with having something important to say to us directly. The personal flaws of this “imperfect man” selected for our inspection are consistently of the anti-hero variety. He is, in short, every bit the visionary and martyr we’ve come to expect from artistic hagiography. The process is completed when Gardiner makes the final turn so familiar to us from our side of the 1800 wall, revealing that the ultimate primary source for Bach’s biography is the testimony of “the music itself.”

The music gives us shafts of insight into the harrowing experiences he must have suffered as an orphan, as a lone teenager, and as a grieving husband and father. They show us his fierce dislike of hypocrisy and his impatience with falsification of any sort; but they also reveal the profound sympathy he felt towards those who grieve or suffer in one way or another, or who struggle with their consciences.

Much of this is merely an extension of the call made over ten years ago by Robert L. Marshall for bolder attempts at Bach Biography. There is much resonance between Gardiner’s portrait of Bach and Marshall’s suggested method, to extend back to Bach the posthumous Freudian couch sessions practiced so provocatively (and questionably) by Maynard Solomon in his biographies of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert. Both Marshall and Gardiner fixate on Bach’s experience of loss. Marshall goes so far as to posit that an obsession with death and human frailty, not to mention a deep attraction to Lutheran orthodoxy, might be explained as a retreat from the anxiety of being twice orphaned, first by parental death, and then by brotherly abandonment. It is a method that requires inflating poorly documented, sometimes partially guessed, bits of biographical detail with intense emotional consequences. Gardiner’s musical analyses flow freely from this font. Simply put, Bach’s personal experience of loss, coupled with his fervent immersion in Lutheran doctrine, led him to a uniquely honest understanding of shame, of temptation, and of the desire for redemption. Such themes, of course, never go out of fashion and were staples as well of Baroque opera and of the sacred works of Vivaldi, Telemann, and scores of other composers. But Gardiner singles out Bach for an “authentic” religious conviction in contrast to the shallowness of his more theatrical contemporaries. To revisit and rewrite Kerman’s formula, “Baroque composers depict the passions . . . except for Bach, who expresses them.” One of us after all. This coupled with Bach’s unmatched willingness to forgo the beautiful and the pleasurable in favor of uncomfortable moments of pain, rage, and revulsion separates him from those others. At its best such diagnoses invest old music with a new and contemporary psychological power, a process that leaves one conflicted, offending the historian while stirring the concertgoer. Being both myself, I’ve long since learned to stop worrying and enjoy the resulting neurotics made out of Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler, Ives, et al., and so I am fully prepared to do the same for Bach. But we should never forget who the patient on the couch really is.

Gardiner’s task is made easier by the predictability of the resulting trope. We all know the artist type that we expect to be born of such angst. The gateway from slim source material to mythological archetype is a bit like Platform Nine and Three-Quarters at King’s Cross Station. It will always be there for you if you run confidently enough at it. In Music in the Castle of Heaven, this dimension of testimonial expressivity remains Bach’s special prerogative among Baroque composers, a special status essential to the book’s final and most substantial argument, that among the music of that entire era Bach’s sacred vocal works are uniquely relevant to our modern condition.

Gardiner provides us two different vantage points on Bach’s testaments. Based on his experience during the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage, he is the perfect guide to walk us through a diachronic survey of an entire year’s cycle. It is an ambitious analysis offering glimpses of a composer responding to the challenge of producing a new sacred composition every week – a complex of moving Rembrandtian musical portraits of humans in distress. For a few cantatas and for the two extant Passion settings he gives us extreme close-ups, visiting with each movement and scene at a level of detail that allows us to luxuriate in the conductor’s vision of his newer darker Bach. His reading of Christ Lag in Todesbanden (BWV 4) demonstrates the surprising zeal of a twenty-two-year-old’s commitment to Lutheran eschatology. The text and governing melody, harshly ritualistic and tribal, are by Luther himself.

No innocence could be found.
Thus it was that Death came so soon
And seized power over us –
Held us captive in his kingdom,
Alleluia!

Bach’s musical setting weeps, wails, and roars with striking realism even as it astounds in its intricate textures. The result is a grim reminder of how effective Luther’s language and Bach’s music can be at bringing abstract theological concerns down into the world of everyday mortality:

Timeframes overlap here: first that of pre-regenerate man, then those of the Thuringians of both Luther’s and Bach’s day, scarred by their regular brushes with pestilential death.

Gardiner uncovers (or injects) much that is new and worth the reader’s time. The St. John and St. Matthew Passion settings get particularly engaging analysis, fitting to their position in Gardiner’s view as the greatest example of music’s ability to mimic tragedy and to force passive listeners into a recognition of their culpability in the world they inhabit:

[they] . . . animate the conventions of tragic myth and tragic conduct . . . leading his listeners to confront their mortality and compelling them to witness things from which they would normally avert their eyes.

These close readings have a lot to offer. They are rich in technical detail for those that want that in a music book, and bold in their emotional lunges for those who will skip past the shop talk of rhythms and counterpoints. But Gardiner’s hope is for more than mere compellingness. It is for relevance. His book is a failure if it cannot frame Bach’s Passions as something more than historical artifacts of a proto-enlightenment. That is the reason he doesn’t go too far into that world before pulling up. Others have already delved farther into what Gardiner almost sheepishly calls “the delicate issue of religious belief,” questioning the ability of today’s audiences to connect to a music so deeply rooted in convictions that many of us do not share or may even outright reject. Richard Taruskin offers that if one digs far enough into the real historical Bach, one finds a worldview worth truly recoiling from, a world of enforced consensus, absolutist ideology, anti-individualism, misogyny, and small-minded bigotry: “pre-Enlightened – and when push came to shove, a violently anti-Enlightened–temper. . . . Such music was a medium of truth, not beauty, and the truth it served – Luther’s truth – was often bitter. . . . Even when Bach is not expressing actively anti-Enlightenment sentiments . . . his settings are pervaded with a general antihumanism.” This, according to Taruskin, is why “only a handful of Bach’s cantatas can be said to have really joined the modern performance repertory, and a thoroughly unrepresentative handful at that.”

Gardiner offers us some relief from that “abandon ship” position, coaxing us to dip a toe into real history, just enough to give us something more real than Pythagorean Bach or Mountaintop Bach, just enough to darken the mood a bit for audiences who like their music pathological but not demagogic. History, in Music in Castle of Heaven, is in the service of contemporary experience. It must bend to achieve Gardiner’s goal, which is to convince us that Bach’s sacred vocal music remains socially relevant. It contains, after all, vivid and relatable depictions of very human human beings at their most pathetic, guilty, ashamed, supplicating, desperate. Gardiner believes above all else that exposure to these works is good for us in a way that even Bach’s own instrumental music cannot match. Simply put, it fosters empathy:

although Bach is habitually required to deal with such towering universal themes as eternity, sin and death, he shows he is also interested in the flickers of doubt and the daily tribulations of every individual, recognising that small lives do not seem small to the people who live them.

The extent of this belief is on stark display on the CD covers to the recordings that coincide with the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage. Released by Gardiner’s own label, each CD features a photograph by Steve McCurry, best known for National Geographic’s famous cover photo of twelve-year-old Sharbat Gula. The CD covers all attempt to repeat the power of that iconic image, a single person staring directly at the camera and thus, challengingly, into the eyes of the listener/holder of the CD. What changes from photo to photo is ethnicity, gender, traditional clothing or makeup. Like Gula, known across America and Europe not by her name but by a reductive formula – “The Afghan Girl” – (direct object + ethnicity + gender = human), the people in the photographs are all easily reduced to interchangeable symbols of exoticness. They are ethnically and geographically diverse, with the notable absence being the white European or American that one might presume is Gardiner’s expected Bach CD purchaser. If their ethnicity does not establish their “otherness,” then their indigenous dress, makeup, or ceremonial posture certainly does – a cascade of very human humans, all very different than you. Shuffle the deck of humanity and buy the complete box set! It is easy to read this exercise as naively exploitative orientalism. But I am willing to give Gardiner the benefit of an earnest belief that these images press the same issue as the music, asking us to confront the ultimate test of empathy – distance. It is easy to feel for the person near you, or the person who most resembles you. The consequences of their suffering are clearer and closer. The true test is how compelled one is to act on behalf of someone far away, who does not resemble you, and who you will never meet. It is a bold and clumsy attempt to make a strong claim that Bach’s sacred music has powerful work to do still today, the highest order of work, of making the world a better place all the way from the private to the global:

for beleaguered humanity at all times and in all places – from instances of false accusation in private or domestic life to the outrages under regimes of torture.

Music in the Castle of Heaven seems meant to complete a triad: striking musical performances, provocative visual imagery, and now a book-length exploration of these works, step by step, psychological trauma by trauma. But this brings us back to where this essay began, prompting the question of why it requires so many pages of biographical backup? Why the need to establish that the message we receive from this astounding music is rooted in Bach’s own psyche and endorsed by his own intentions? Twenty years ago, during the great “authentic performance” debates, this same question was asked of performers like Gardiner who claimed “historical verisimilitude” as a justification for their new performance style rather than simply admitting that they played the way they wanted to because they (and we) liked the sound. Gardiner’s own rhetoric was called into question back then as an example of the poietic fallacy, the idea that the only, or most valid, meaning of a musical work is one derived from the composer’s own thought process. It is a habit that leads us to credit our own feelings to someone else – someone whose mind we cannot hope to read, but whose authority we crave – the composer or author as lawgiver. The debate is long settled so far as performance is concerned, and performers in the new style have (mostly) accepted that, as Taruskin sneakily commended them, “being the true voice of one’s time is . . . roughly forty thousand times as vital and important as being the assumed voice of history.” But reading Music in the Castle of Heaven, it seems as if Gardiner, the author, learned nothing from the trials of Gardiner, the performer, or at least thought he might slip old habits by in another form.

Take for a final example his readings of Cantatas 178, 179, and 135, the texts of which center on spiritual hypocrisy (from BWV 178: “wicked men . . . conceiving their artful plots with the serpent’s guile” and from BWV 179: “Likeness of false hypocrites, We could Sodom’s apples call them, Who, with rot though they be filled, On the outside brightly glisten.”). The music is filled with strident, heavily articulated orchestral slicing, fiery long-winded chewing-outs for melodies, and unexpected harmonic thunderclaps. For Gardiner, the one thing that is missing is personal testimony:

such sustained defiance that one asks whether there is a submerged story here – of Bach operating in a hostile environment. How much more satisfying, then, for him to channel all that frustration and vituperative energy into his music. . . . This is superb, angry music executed with a palpable fury, with Bach fuming at delinquent malefactors. One can picture the city elders, sitting in the best pews, listening to these post-Trinitarian harangues, registering their intent and starting to feel increasingly uncomfortable as these shockingly direct words – and Bach’s still more strident and abrasive music – hit home.

Perhaps. Certainly the notion reinforces Gardiner’s own Bach mythology, Bach again as prototype, this time of the outsider anti-hero – proto-Beethoven. It is attractive. But whatever satisfying defiance this music parallels in modern listeners – anger at hypocritical corporate double-speak or outraged moralizing at ignorant power-wielding political hacks – is both self-evident in the sound and already built in to our cultural moment. It does not require the backing of Bach’s imaginary diary or visions of puffed-up Leipzig burghers.

In the end, the book is an argument for these difficult works to be kept alive, sprinkled with a fear that in our age of spiritual skepticism, and our new $.99/track digital music marketplace, Bach’s shorter instrumental works (and heaven forbid Vivaldi’s brilliant and breezily accessible concerti and arias) may be better built to thrive. But the case for relevance, and the call to keep the cantatas from fading, will be made between Bach’s music, his performers, and us. The answer to the question “why should we listen to this?” does not have to coincide with the answer to the question “why did he write it?”

If one has any doubts, look around at how many different Bachs are coexisting today, when more than a century of shifting performance styles and emotional perspectives are all streaming together on Youtube: Romantic Bach, Modern Bach, Gothic Bach, Pythagorean Bach, ascetic Bach, Lutheran Bach, audacious virtuoso Bach. You can choose whichever you’d like today, and a different one tomorrow. They all once claimed to be “the real” Bach – proof of how the process of reception is the history that matters. Just be aware, when reading Music in the Castle of Heaven, that John Eliot Gardiner’s tragic orphan-empath is only one Bach among those many. No more or less accurate to the “true” past, but perhaps more prepared to survive the immediate future.

Born in 1683, two years before J. S. Bach, to a family of Kirchberg clothmakers, Christoph Graupner displayed an unusual facility for sight-singing at a young age. His uncle, organist Nikolaus Küster, provided Graupner his early musical training and convinced the boy’s parents that he should accompany him to his new post in Reichenbach, also in Saxony, for further education. Graupner was admitted to the St. Thomas School in Leipzig in 1696, long before Bach’s arrival, studied under Johann Kuhnau and collaborated with Telemann, and, upon exmatriculation in 1704, began to study law at the University of Leipzig.

The invasion of Saxony by Swedish troops in 1706 cut short his advanced studies and forced Graupner to flee to Hamburg where he found safety in a position as harpsichordist in an opera orchestra where Handel was a violinist. Between 1707 and 1709, Graupner composed five operas for the Oper am Gänsemarkt in an ecelctic musical style, combining French and German elements, that were well-received by the Hamburg audience.

Then, in 1709, Graupner’s life took another important turn when he accepted the position of Assistant Kapellmeister at the Landgraviate of Hesse-Darmstadt, rising to the top position in 1712. At first he focused on operatic composition at the Darmstadt Hofkapelle, at one point supervising some forty musicians, but after financial cutbacks in 1717, Graupner abandoned opera, cut the size of his staff and turned his attention to instrumental music and cantatas. Tempted, however, by the thought of returning to Saxony, Graupner competed for the position of cantor of the main churches in Leipzig that had opened up as the result of Kuhnau’s death, but when the Landgrave raised his pay and gave him other incentives to remain in Darmstadt, Graupner turned down the position that Bach finally accepted in 1723.

Now firmly entrenched in Hesse, Graupner composed more than one hundred “symphonies” (three-movement sinfonias or multi-movement dance suites in major keys), half as many concertos (mainly for woodwinds, half in the three-movement Vivaldi pattern and the others in four movements), and a sizable number of chamber works and keyboard suites that fused French and Italian styles. Highly regarded as a harpsichordist and for his accurate, elegant copies of the scores of other popular composers of the day, Graupner composed more than 1,400 Lutheran church cantatas, many of which reflect an awareness of compositional innovations originating elsewhere.

Hagia Eirene (St. Irene Church) stands on what is believed to be the oldest site of Christian worship in Istanbul. Roman Emperor Constantine I ordered the church in the fourth century, making it the first church built in Constantinople, and it is also the only church that was not turned into a mosque after the Ottomans conquered Istanbul in 1453. Eventually the Topkapi Palace walls enclosed the church, and the building was pressed into service as an armory and booty warehouse.

In the early twentieth century, the former church was transformed into a military museum, and now, under the control of the Turkish Ministry of Culture, the church’s original atrium, an apse containing five rows of built-in seats, and a great cross outlined in black against a gold background in the half-dome above the apse combine to create an extraordinary atmosphere for performances of western art music.

8 March 2014 marks the three-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. Consequently, his work will be at the center of Bachfest Leipzig 2014 – set in the context of the work of his father, Johann Sebastian, and his godfather and predecessor in his post in Hamburg, Georg Philipp Telemann.

The most important textbook and treatise by C. P. E. Bach, Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen (Essay on the True Art of of Playing Keyboard Instruments), published in 1753, is the source of the theme for the festival.

Christopher Hogwood, Ton Koopman, Christoph Spering, Dorothee Mields, Midori Seiler, Malcolm Bilson to name just some – only the best musicians join with Leipzig’s Thomanerchor to investigate the “true art” of making music. We will be welcoming the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra (Toronto), our “orchestra-in-residence,” on their first visit to Leipzig, where they will play three concerts. With the Academy of Ancient Music, the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra, the Akademie für Alte Musik and Capella Cracoviensis, many of the most famous Baroque orchestras will be performing during the Bachfest.

When Gustav Mahler arrived in New York in the winter of 1907-8 to take up his post as principal conductor of the Metropolitan Opera, he came as the champion of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra and other immense masterworks, and as the composer of equally monumental symphonies.

It must have seemed somewhat incongruous, therefore, to those attending the New York Philharmonic Society concert of 10 November 1909, to see Mahler, by then the conductor of that orchestra as well, tuck his baton under his arm (as an eyewitness reported), sit down at a harpsichord and lead a performance of orchestral-suite music by Johann Sebastian Bach.

Mahler had assembled the score himself, taking music from Bach’s Orchestral Suites in B minor (BWV 1067) and D Major (BWV 1068), and producing a symphonylike arrangement of four movements. The fact that the new suite began in B minor (with the Overture from BWV 1067) and ended in D Major (with the Gavottes I and II from BWV 1068) might have violated Baroque convention, but it was fully in line with Mahler’s personal enthusiasm for ascending, minor-to-major key schemes, seen, for example, in the Resurrection Symphony of 1895 (which climbs from C minor to E flat Major). Like many other nineteenth and twentieth-century composers, Mahler did not hesitate to put his own stamp on Bach’s music when bringing it to performance.

Mahler’s admiration for Bach was intense and of long standing. According to his wife, Alma, the only scores he allowed in the summer house where he composed were the works of Bach. And in 1901 he confessed to Natalie Bauer-Lechner: ”It can hardly be expressed, what I learn more and more from Bach (admittedly as a child sitting at his feet), for my innate method of writing is Bach-like. If only I had time to immerse myself completely in this highest school!”

To this he added: ”I will dedicate my later days to him, when I am my own man.” In America, freed from the constraints of the Court Opera in Vienna and aware of his own fragile health, Mahler seems to have believed that the moment to express his passion for Bach publicly had arrived.

In making his suite arrangement, Mahler was following a path taken by many other musicians who were equally driven to update or improve Bach’s scores. Indeed, one can trace this path back to the composer’s own family: soon after Bach’s death, his eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann, revamped many of the cantata scores for performances in Halle, adding, for instance, trumpet and timpani parts and a Latin text to two movements the cantata Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott (BWV 80). The brass parts were so attractive that they were printed with the work in the complete Bach Edition of the nineteenth century and are still included in many performances today.

The second-eldest son, Carl Philipp Emanuel, took great pains to preserve and champion his father’s music. Yet in 1786, when he paid homage to the Mass in B minor (BWV 232) by giving the premiere of the Credo section at a benefit concert in Hamburg, he did not balk at updating the work by adding an instrumental introduction of his own composition and by changing the instrumentation in a number of movements. Around the same time, Mozart arranged preludes and fugues from The Well-Tempered Clavier (BWV 846-93) for string ensemble, for performances at Baron Gottfried van Swieten’s famous ”Bach salons” in Vienna.

In 1802 the early Bach biographer Johann Nikolaus Forkel seems to have sounded the alarm for restraint, noting that the unaccompanied violin Sonatas and Partitas (BWV 1001-6), for example, were so perfect and complete in themselves that ”a second instrument was neither necessary nor possible.”

Mendelssohn and Schumann clearly thought otherwise. Mendelssohn wrote a piano accompaniment for the Chaconne of the Partita in D minor (BWV 1004) for a Leipzig Gewandhaus performance with the violinist Ferdinand David in 1841, and Schumann wrote piano accompaniments for all six of the unaccompanied violin works, and for the unaccompanied cello suites as well. Schumann remarked that Mendelssohn’s piano accompaniment of the D minor Chaconne sounded so fresh and convincing that ”the old, immortal cantor seemed to have a hand in the performance himself.”

And this is to say nothing of the electronic transformations of Wendy Carlos, the vocal renditions of the Swingle Singers and Bobby McFerrin, or the jazz interpretations of Jacques Loussier and Dave Brubeck. The list of Bach arrangements is lengthy indeed, and in the less dogmatic atmosphere of the post-”original forces” age, it appears to be getting longer. (Witness Ton Koopman’s recent reconstruction of the lost St. Mark Passion [BWV 247].)

What is it about Bach’s music that makes it such prime material for rearrangement? Why don’t we have a host of Mozart transcriptions or Brahms reorchestrations?

Part of the explanation can be found in Baroque musical practices, and in Bach’s compositional methods in particular. During the Baroque there was a strong tradition of musical borrowing, of using existing music as the basis for improvisation or new composition. A contemporary tells us that when Bach sat down at the keyboard, he would ”set his powers of imagination in motion” by playing something by another composer. Handel could scarcely pick up a pen without quoting someone else’s themes. Telemann liked to use the works of others, too.

In his youth, Bach reworked music by the day’s leading composers: Johann Adam Reincken (the Hamburg dean of German organists), Giovanni Legrenzi (the Venetian master of progressive trio sonatas) and Arcangelo Corelli (the Venetian codifier of the Baroque concerto). By fashioning fugues and keyboard transcriptions from their music, Bach acquainted himself with current styles and forms while finding his own artistic voice.

Later, as an established organ virtuoso at the Weimar court, Bach turned once again to keyboard arrangements, transcribing dozens of fashionable instrumental concertos by Vivaldi, Telemann, Benedetto Marcello and others. Here he appears to have competed with his cousin and colleague Johann Gottfried Walther to create keyboard transcriptions that captured the colors and contrasts of the Baroque instrumental ensemble.

When Bach became St. Thomas Cantor and town music director in Leipzig in 1723, he found himself under tremendous pressure to produce new works on a weekly basis, first for Lutheran church services and then for concerts of the university collegium musicum. During the initial years, he composed an extraordinary amount of music.

But he also began to recycle earlier pieces on a vast scale, arranging the music in brilliantly imaginative ways. New texts were inserted for old, outdated scorings were modernized, and instrumental concertos were transformed almost beyond recognition into cantata sinfonias, choruses and arias.

By the 1730’s, reworking old music had become a compositional way of life for Bach. The St. Mark Passion, the Christmas Oratorio (BWV 248) and the second book of The Well-Tempered Clavier (BWV 870-93) appear to have been produced largely through the recycling of existing material. The same is true of the harpsichord concertos, the four short Masses (BWV 233-6) and the Mass in B minor. Bach also arranged music by Palestrina, Caldara, Pergolesi and others, adding new touches and bringing the scores into line with his own style.

For many Baroque composers, revamping existing scores was a practical expediency. For Bach, it became a high art, an opportunity to enhance his own music and that of others, and carry it to a loftier level of perfection. Since absolute perfection could not be achieved by mortal man, the improvement of musical works was a never-ending process.

When Mozart and Brahms completed a piece, they closed the book and moved on to another project. For Bach, composition was a continuing affair, even with seemingly finished works. Hence, the Goldberg Variations (BWV 988) were augmented with a set of Fourteen Canons (BWV 1087), the Canonic Variations on Vom Himmel hoch da komm ich her (BWV 769) were given a new organizational scheme, and The Art of Fugue (BWV 1080) was expanded beyond its original design.

The transcendent values of Bach’s music – its melodic beauty, its contrapuntal strength, its rhythmic vitality, its harmonic profundity – speak across time, in a universal language, to a multitude of composers. But it is the embracing, inspiring open-endedness of his works that seems to move others to roll up their sleeves and try to carry Bach’s efforts farther.

It was in this spirit that Mahler appears to have approached his Bach orchestral-suite arrangement. He preserved the general text of Bach’s score, limiting his changes to the addition of dynamic markings, slurs and tempo gradations. He also shortened the value of detached notes here and there, to ensure uniform articulations.

In forte passages, he reinforced the solo flute with supplementary flutes and a clarinet, to produce a sufficient tutti in Carnegie Hall. (As it happens, Bach once did a similar thing: in the instrumental march of the cantata Vereinigte Zwietracht der wechselnden Saiten (BWV 207), a movement apparently used for a student processional in a large space, he asked that the parts be reinforced by as many as seven players.)

But Mahler also embellished Bach’s music with the addition of two written-out continuo parts, one for harpsichord, the other for organ. In the published score of 1910, he stated that the printed parts should be ”regarded as a sketch, which should bear . . . the characteristics of a free improvisation.” Mahler revived the suite arrangement several times with the Philharmonic, and Alma tells us that he altered the harpsichord accompaniment each time, ”according to his fancy.”

In the published version, we see that Mahler treats the harpsichord not as a steadily chordal instrument, in a Baroque way, but rather as a first-chair instrument that emerges here and there to add special splashes of orchestral color. This imparts a distinctly Mahleresque touch to the score.

Bach’s colleague Johann Mattheson seems to have had such accretions in mind when he advised composers that it was perfectly permissible to borrow someone else’s music, as long as it was returned with interest.

The year 2012 is unlikely to go down well in the annals of Jewish-German relations.

In June, a German court ruled that religious circumcision of minors is a criminal act. Two months earlier, Germany’s largest-selling daily broadsheet had published a poem by Nobel prize-winning author – and former SS recruit – Günter Grass, accusing Israel of endangering world peace.

A month before that, parishioners of Berlin’s Cathedral threatened to leave their church should it allow an Easter performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. John Passion [BWV 245]. The libretto had been altered by three Jews to make it less “Judeophobic.” They had replaced passages depicting Jews calling for Jesus’s crucifixion with extracts from Jewish liturgy and Muslim poetry. In the event, the altered version went ahead.

Of the three events, the Bach boycott was perhaps the most predictable. Germany, Jews, and music have often proved an unhappy combination. From Richard Wagner’s bitter diatribe against Jews in music to the forcing of musically proficient prisoners to form an orchestra at Auschwitz, the music of Germany has seldom given Jews much cause for celebration.

From Wagner to the orchestra at Auschwitz, Germany, Jews and music have often proved an unhappy combination

Add to this mix Martin Luther, founder of the denomination to which Bach belonged, and it becomes still more volatile. Among Luther’s works, in Bach’s extensive theology library, was his notorious essay, On the Jews and their Lies, which declared: “Be on your guard against the Jews, knowing that wherever they have their synagogues, nothing is found but a den of devils. . . . [T]hey are nothing but thieves and robbers . . . one should toss out these lazy rogues by the seat of their pants . . . eject them forever from this country.” [Rick Erickson notes: “In his Bach’s St. John Passion and the Jews, Michael Marissen reports that ‘Lutheran church bodies have officially repudiated Luther’s anti-Jewish writings.'”]

Given how widely known Bach’s Lutheranism was, it is small wonder the Nazis adulated him. To mark the two hundred fiftieth anniversary of his birth in 1935, they helped stage a Reich Bach Festival in Leipzig, where Bach spent his last three decades as cantor of the choir school of the Thomas church and director of church music. It was there he composed his most celebrated choral works, including the St. John Passion.

Of the Leipzig celebrations, a newspaper at the time reported: “The Führer followed the austere music of Bach seriously . . . It is a music in harmony with his spirit – austere, disciplined to its core, and German through and through.” This was also the view of Nazi musicologist Richard Eichenauer, who asserted that: “The fugue is blond and blue-eyed.” Eichenauer also said: “The nature of the German chorale in its great era during the religious wars contained nothing specifically Christian in musical terms, but rather something generally and eternally German, i. e., that elemental joy in combat, a characteristic of Nordic man.”

In such a context, some might applaud the three Jews who revised the St. John Passion. Others might wonder why any Jew would bother at all with Bach’s music.

In fact, there is no reason why Jews should not embrace Bach and his St. John Passion. In some ways, they have more reason than most, Jews having played such a decisive role in preserving it for posterity as well as in elevating Bach to his current position among the world’s best known and most widely performed composers.

The St. John Passion is regarded as antisemitic not just through depicting Jews as calling for the death of Jesus, but doing so in a particularly frenzied and discordant manner. However, one should not rush to judgment without some understanding of the nature and history of Christian liturgy.

For a millennium before the Reformation, the liturgy for the Christian Holy Week (the seven days before Easter) included readings from all four gospels of the so-called “Passion” – the arrest, trial and crucifixion of Jesus. Traditionally, the evening service for Good Friday was given over to reading the account of the Passion according to John.

In time, these Easter readings from John’s gospel became subject to ever more elaborate musical setting. By the time of Bach’s appointment at Leipzig in 1723, part of his duties involved providing a musical setting of the St. John Passion for the Good Friday service.

Unlike Telemann and Handel, Bach could not simply avail himself totally of the 1710 libretto by Barthold Heinrich Brockes. This was because Brockes had partly précised John’s text, whereas Bach was under instructions to reproduce unaltered in his church music all scriptural passages from which he drew. It is John’s gospel that states Jews called for Jesus’ death. So the way Bach depicts Jews in his St. John Passion proves nothing more than that he was adhering to the terms of his employment contract.

In Bach’s day, few Lutherans took seriously their founder’s teachings about Jews. Most of the better educated ones, among whom Bach was decidedly one, were tolerant of and accommodating towards them. For example, in April 1715, the Hamburg Senate issued a proclamation relating to Easter renditions of John’s Passion. It asserted that: “The right and proper goal of reflection on the Passion must be aimed at the awakening of true penitence . . . Other things, such as violent invectives and exclamations against . . . the Jews . . . can by no means be tolerated.”

Their accommodating attitude towards Jews was shared by many of Leipzig’s better educated Lutherans, as is illustrated by a document discovered only in 1994. This is a report, dated 14 May 1714, written and signed by theologians at the University of Leipzig. The report’s existence had long been known of, but not its contents.

The report had been commissioned by Augustus, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, who had wanted to know, as its title indicates, Whether the Jews Use Christian Blood, in their ceremonies. Many suspect the Leipzig theologians were consulted because Augustus knew in advance they would exonerate the Jews. He needed theological ammunition against his less enlightened subjects who were calling for the banishment of Jews – on whose loans and tax receipts he was reliant.

In no uncertain terms, the report denied there was any evidence that Jews used Christian blood and plenty of reason to suggest they would have considered its use anathema. Among the report’s signatories were two highly progressive Leipzig theologians. One, its principal author, had studied at Oxford during the 1690s, becoming a keen follower of John Locke and translating the English philosopher’s 1693 tract on education. The other, who outlived Bach in Leipzig by two years, venerated that first theologian and also possessed a portrait of the Rabbi of Amsterdam.

It is inconceivable they would not have known and fully agreed with Locke’s 1689 Letter Concerning Toleration, which championed tolerance towards Jews, even supporting their being accorded full citizenship rights, along with Muslims.

Bach seems to have been no less devoid of antisemitism. Although unable to alter John’s account of the Passion, he had discretion over what additional material to include in its musical setting. While he drew on Brockes’s libretto, Bach refrained from borrowing any of its non-gospel passages that some consider hostile to Jews. Instead, the passages he added firmly locate the blame for Jesus’s death in the sinful behavior of all errant humankind. Jews go entirely unmentioned in his St. Matthew Passion [BWV 244], composed two years later; that gospel’s account having not mentioned them by name.

Bach also identified with the Levite musicians of the Temple, whose job was to summon the Divine Presence through music. In his copy of the Bible, he wrote appreciative comments next to verses from the Book of Chronicles alluding to this. And, upon turning fifty, the normally taciturn composer compiled a family tree showing how far back in his male lineage professional musicianship ran. Some have seen in this act a symbolic fulfillment of the biblical injunction for the Hebrews to engage in family reunion in the fiftieth “Jubilee” year.

At the time of Bach’s death in 1750 some fifteen years later, however, it might have seemed that the musical offerings of this Lutheran “Levite” had fallen on deaf ears. Few of his compositions had been published; manuscript copies were scarce and expensive; his polyphonic style unfashionable; and his choral works unperformed.

For the next eighty years, Bach’s musical flame was largely kept alight by a small coterie of Berlin Jews, members of the Itzig and Mendelssohn families. In 1804, union between them was forged through the marriage of Abraham Mendelssohn, son of the philosopher Moses, to Lea Salomon, daughter of the Berlin banker Jacob Salomon and Bella Itzig.

Bella was one of sixteen children of Daniel Itzig, court banker to Frederick the Great of Prussia and a close friend of Moses Mendelssohn. Among Bella’s ten sisters was a younger sister Sara, who married another prominent Berlin Jewish banker, Samuel Solomon Levy.

During their childhoods, Bella and her elder sister Hanna received musical instruction from Johann Philipp Kirnberger, one of Bach’s foremost students. Sara was taught by Bach’s eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann, and became an accomplished performer of Bach’s keyboard works – and an avid collector of his manuscript scores. After ceasing to perform publicly in 1816, Sara Levy donated her large collection of musical scores to the Berlin Sing-Akademie, a choral, later musical, society established in 1791 by Carl Fasch, assistant to Bach’s second son.

After Fasch’s death in 1800, directorship of the Sing-Akademie passed to his pupil, Carl Friedrich Zelter, who later taught composition to the children of Abraham and Lea Mendelssohn, Fanny and Felix. Abraham and Lea may have met at the informal Sunday gatherings of the Sing-Akadamie, both having joined in their teens.

Like her aunt, Lea Mendelssohn was a keen lover of Bach’s music, as was her husband Abraham. After the death of its last custodian in 1805, Bach’s estate was auctioned. From it, the couple purchased the bulk of Bach’s manuscript scores that they donated to the Sing-Akadamie. The music it thereby acquired included more than one hundred unique autograph scores of Bach’s works among which is likely to have been a manuscript copy of the St. Matthew Passion. For shortly after the donation, Zelter began to perform excerpts at the Sing-Akademie.

Felix Mendelssohn joined the Sing-Akademie in 1819 aged ten, quickly developing such a keen interest in the St. Matthew Passion that his grandmother arranged for a professional copy to be made for a birthday present.

Six years later, in April 1829, Felix Mendelssohn put on and conducted the first public performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion since the death of its composer. So well received was it that a second performance was hastily arranged. Practically all of Prussia’s most eminent public figures attended one or other performance. Together they cemented Bach’s reputation in Germany.

To secure their residency rights, rather than out of religious conviction, Abraham Mendelssohn had all his children converted to Lutheranism while young. But Felix, against his father’s advice, never repudiated his Jewish roots or his grandfather’s surname. After his triumphant performance, Felix reputedly quipped to an actor friend who had sung the part of Jesus: “And to think that it must be an actor and a Jew-boy who had to restore the greatest Christian musical work.”

The Nazis made no distinction between race and religion. In their endeavor to erase from Germany all trace of the contribution of Jews to its musical heritage, they removed in 1936 the memorial statue of Felix Mendelssohn from outside of the Leipzig concert hall.

On that basis alone, Jews today should not emulate their practice by ignoring or doctoring the music of Germany’s non-Jewish composers, especially Bach’s. Given how prominent a role Jews have played in preserving and promoting it, they should instead have no compunction in celebrating and enjoying it – with passion.

It makes palpable the breath of love and arouses the fingers with generosity.

Its sound of thanks fills one with joy, and, by piercing the clouds, it showers blessings upon us all.

In this engraving published by Johann Christoph Weigel in Regensburg in 1698, a woodwind instrument maker is putting finishing touches on a dulcian while a completed bassoon leans against his workbench. Music historians generally consider the dulcian to be the forerunner of the modern bassoon, as the two instruments share many characteristics: a double reed fitted to a metal crook, obliquely drilled tone holes, and a conical bore that doubles back on itself.

The origins of the dulcian, or fagotto in Italian, are obscure, but by the mid-sixteenth century it was available in as many as eight different sizes. Its primary function was to provide the bass in wind consorts made up of either loud shawms or soft recorders, indicating a remarkable ability to vary dynamics to suit the need. Otherwise, only eight finger holes and two keys limited each size of dulcian’s usefulness to very few key signatures.

It appears that the Baroque bassoon was a newly invented instrument, rather than a simple modification of the one-piece dulcian, but the dulcian continued to be used by Bach and others alongside the bassoon well into the eighteenth century. The person most likely responsible for developing the more advanced bassoon was Jacques-Martin Hotteterre. Some historians believe that, sometime in the 1650s, Hotteterre conceived the three-keyed bassoon in four sections (bell, bass joint, boot and wing joint), an arrangement that allowed great accuracy in wood machining. While no French instruments from that time period have survived, bassoons from the 1680s of Johann Christoph Denner and Richard Haka are still extant.

Composers first used the bassoon to reinforce the bass line of the string orchestra or as the lowest voice in a double reed choir of oboes and tailles. Jean-Baptiste Lully combined the newly invented oboes and bassoons with strings in his Les Petits Violons. Antonio Cesti included a bassoon in his 1668 opera Il Pomo d’oro. The use of bassoons in concert orchestras was sporadic, however, until the late seventeenth century when double reeds began to make their way into standard instrumentation. This was largely due to the spread of the oboe to countries outside of France. Increasing use of the bassoon as a basso continuo instrument meant that it also began to be included in opera orchestras, first in France and later in Italy, Germany and England.

Sometime around 1700, a fourth key was added, and it was for this type of instrument that Vivaldi, Telemann and Bach wrote their demanding scores. A fifth key was added during the first half of the eighteenth century. Notable makers of the four-key and five-key Baroque bassoon were J. H. Eichentopf; J. Poerschmann; Thomas Stanesby, Jr.; G. H. Scherer and Prudent Thieriot.

Today, many Baroque bassoonists in North America play a reproduction of a late seventeenth-century instrument discovered by William Waterhouse in the former East Germany. The Model HKICW by Guntram Wolf Holzblasinstrumente features a wing joint and bocal that pitches the instrument at a’ = 415 Hz, the Kammerton at which most historical woodwind instruments are pitched.

Reeds for Baroque bassoons vary widely among players. Not only do the physical characteristics of cane vary from one shipment to the next, but every possible design variable, including length, profile, gouge, shape, diameter of cane, etc., is investigated by each player in an effort to derive the best musical effect from his or her Baroque bassoon.

A great degree of flexibility of pitch control, through the use of breath support and embouchure, as well as reed profile, is available to bassoonists, and players can also use alternate fingerings to adjust the pitch of many notes. In a manner similar to other woodwind instruments, the overall length of the bassoon can be slightly increased to lower pitch or decreased to raise pitch. On the bassoon, this is done by pulling out or pushing in the bocal, the curved metal piece to which the reed is attached.

The Holy Week tradition of reading a Gospel narrative of the trial, crucifixion and burial of Jesus, called a “passion,” dates back at least to the fourth century. During the Middle Ages, the passion was chanted, rather than just spoken, and specific voices began to assume the roles of Jesus (bass), the Evangelist (tenor) and the crowd (altos and sopranos). Eventually, polyphonic settings were composed for various passages, and by the time of the Reformation, through-composed passions were entirely polyphonic.

Martin Luther disapproved of many of these practices, and in his 1520 pamphlet Eyn Sermon von der Betrachtung des heiligenn leydens Christi, he declared, “The Passion of Christ should not be acted out in words and pretense, but in real life.” Despite his admonition, sung passion performances were widespread among the newly established Lutheran churches, and Luther’s collaborator, Johann Walter, wrote the simple responsorial passion used in Leipzig’s churches until Georg Philipp Telemann broke with tradition in 1717 at the Good Friday morning service at the New Church. Telemann’s passion oratorio, with its arias, recitatives and instrumental accompaniments, was an immediate success and paved the way for Bach’s predecessor, Johann Kuhnau, to gain permission to perform his own two-part concerted passion, before and after the sermon, at the Good Friday Vespers at St. Thomas Church in 1721.

Thus the stage was set for Bach’s introduction of his St. John Passion (BWV 245) at Good Friday Vespers at Leipzig’s St. Nicholas Church in 1724 and his St. Matthew Passion (BWV 244) at St. Thomas Church on Good Friday in 1727.